this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Man, people miss out on so much good eating because of preconceptions and gatekeeping.
Berries go with almost anything. And yeah, technically strawberries aren't berries. But the point is that pretty much every berry is a blend of acidic tartness, sweetness, and complex flavors. There's no world in which berries make something bad.
Any fruit has the potential to go with any standard food. Meats, pastas, breads, even veggies. It's a matter of balancing the specific fruit with the other ingredients.
That's why pineapple on pizza works. Tangy, sweet, and with that hard to describe tropical fruitiness. It brings out the sweetness of a good tomato sauce while cutting through the fattiness of toppings and any oils.
Pork chops and applesauce baby, it's a classic for reason. Pork stuffed with apples; and other things, orange chicken or duck, blackberry glazed venison roast (seriously, you want to try it), apricot beef (or lamb), curried goat with prunes (or apricot, or peaches even), roasted brussels sprouts with apples and cranberries.
It's all about the balancing with other things.
The Polish strawberry pasta? It's balanced out with sour cream that mutes the sweetness some, and works as a bridge with the pasta.
I know I'm talking into a void here, what with this being a meme, but I'm always so amazed that people will dismiss a food combination without trying it, or sometimes without even trying to imagine the possibilities.
Syntax error: Unmatched parentheses on paragraph 5
The classic pitfall of the ADHD parentheses in a parentheses info dump
Nice catch, thanks :)
I blame Alton Brown.
Hear me out.
Alton Brown is undoubtedly a legendary figure and he did a lot of good for the modern state of culinary entertainment. His scientific, experimental approach was authoritative. He came up with what was scientifically the best way to do a thing, demonstrated why, and did it in a very entertaining way.
But with that, came scores of fans who saw "this is the best way to do a thing" and interpreted that as "this is the only way to do a thing, fuck you you're doing it wrong."
Alton wasn't doing what other TV chefs were doing. Emeril and Julia presented really good recipes, they'd add some flare and say hey, this is how we do it around here. Bourdain explored the world and showed off a lot of great ways to cook. He was reluctant to criticize and clearly just loved the food.
But Alton Brown, for all the good he did, opened up authority to fans who didn't know shit about fuck. He spoke with confidence about how his method was the right method.
Right about the time the Internet was coming in to it's own and arguing about nonsense online became a hobby a person could have.
Now, there's a culture of being right about cooking online. People who log in every day just to bitch about how somebody else cooked something.
Obviously it's not exclusively Alton's fault, and Alton is as open to new and interesting ways to cook things as Bourdain was, a fact you'll discover if he ever happens to visit your home town and read what he says about the food there on his Facebook page.
But there is a through line there, and it starts at Good Eats.
I still can't get over the militant grilled cheese vs melt arguments that were common online a year ago.
If food tastes good, who cares what the hell it's called or how "authentic" it is. No food is authentic from the get-go; someone tries something new one day, other people like it, and it catches on and becomes a thing. If it's not your thing, or if you think it could be done better with x, y, and z, that's fine, everyone has personal tastes and you don't have to like everything.
You know, I agree, especially about Alton not being the cause as much as it is the viewers looking for am excuse to feel holier-than-thou about something.
You're dead right that people took his work way too far and assumed that because he was breaking things down into the underlying food science and methodology that the exact preparations he used were default the best, period.
He wasn't prone to that himself, though he did go hard against myths.
He's a terrific food educator. One of the best in television history imo. But you're also dead right about the entertainment side screwing things up. His on screen persona, combined with the structure of good eats as a show made it too easy for food snobs to glom onto the wrong parts
I think you said it better than I did. Dude just wanted to educate and people just can't let something be good. It has to be correct.
9/11 also did a number on food shows
I don't know if I agree with that. I think Alton was vastly more New Guard, Question Tradition than many of the other notable celebrity chefs and cooks during his come up. If you want to talk about people enforcing tradition, let's take a look at Giada DeLaurentis, or hell even Rachel Ray whenever it comes to anything with Sicilian origin.
I think the Old Guard mentality is vastly more rigid about these sort of traditions and giving people a critical understanding of the processes behind cooking doesn't, at least to me, imply any kind of singular authoritarian approach to cuisine.
edit: typos and cleaning up for clarity
Also Brown definitely wouldn't have been the first to enforce faux tradition.
That shit has existed forever and the more meaningless, the more militant.
Ketchup on hotdogs. Folded pizza. Seafood with red wine.
All said with more authority yet far less evidence than anything Alton Brown ever said.
Ok now I'm hungry and I want to try Polish strawberry pasta.
I haven't had access to good, fresh strawberries since I heard about it, but even grocery store ones were yummy. Maybe not the best thing ever, I would prefer a strawberry shortcake pretty much every time. But it's essentially the same flavors (excepting the sour cream); the textures are what makes it a new experience.
This is the recipe I used.
It worked really well, maybe fifteen, twenty minutes of work total. I kept things kinda medium chunky. Used a potato masher for maybe ten mashes. Tried it both warm and chilled. The taste was more strawberry forward warm, but it was overall better chilled since the sauce hits the tongue different. It kinda rolls across, deploying the strawberry in layers with the sour cream more. Made for better mouth feel and general taste, at the expense of that vibrant strawberry kick.
I get people wanting to defend the "traditional" preparation of a food, because otherwise you get into weird philosophical "burrito of Theseus" issues, but... You can just slap "non-traditional" on it and then carry on and enjoy the food. If you feel really strongly or it's really out there, call it a fucked up ____ inspired whatever.
One of the best pizzas I ever had was at a pizza place near me that has a "trust us" pizza, where you don't know what it is, but it's new and definitely worth the cost (they're not giving you a plain cheese pizza). It was like a strawberry and anduille pizza with a seasoned sweet white sauce. It was weirdly good.
Seems dangerous to let people order a dish without knowing what's in it. Lots of people are allergic to strawberries and might not otherwise expect that to be on a pizza if not disclosed up front.
They do ask you to let them know if you have any allergies, and they do tell you what everything is when they give it to you. You're not at risk for eating something you can't. You'd have to not tell them when they ask, and then ignore them when they told you the ingredients.
That sounds ok, then, if they actually ask you your allergies up front. If they only told you when serving, I'd still be a bit upset if I ended up paying for a dish I couldn't eat. Better than dying of anaphylaxis either way, though.
Totally. And the staff is also pretty reasonable about how it's ultimately just a fun way to get food you might not have thought of.
I usually tell them I hate sour cream and they'll let me know if I should get something else, which is technically against the "rules", but it's also just pizza that I'm paying for and not a national secret or anything.
Man, I would love a place like that.